Morality and Hate Crime

Hate Crimes are wrong. While the ”Crime” bit already suggests as much, the ”Hate” bit pushes it definitely over the edge. We can think of acts that may be illegal, and being of a type that ought to be illegal, but which, under the circumstances, might still be the right thing to do. Or that, under certain circumstances, would be complicated enough to raise important moral questions concerning the status of the individual act. Theft is an example, the moral status of which depends on ones’ conditions and ones’ options. Killing someone perceived to pose an indirect threat is another.

But if you commit a crime against someone because you hate a group to which he/she belongs, justification seems out of the question. There is no more important interest that would be served by your acting on this hatred. And if there were (if you hate people that try to kill you, say), the ”reason” for the hatred – not the hatred itself – would provide the moral justification for the act. It then becomes important which your reason is – the hatred or the reason for the hatred. When Dirty Harry says ”Go ahead, make my day”, he is looking for a proper justification for an act that he would have liked to do anyway. Such justification lacking, DH would have been guilty of a hate crime against Punks, say.

Hatred, in the relevant sense, is rarely if ever justified. Indeed, it has been suggested that the term ”Hate Crime” be replaced with ”Bias Crime” or ”Prejudice Crime” because unlike ”Hate”, those terms imply a fault – either that the belief is false, or that it is based on insufficient evidence. ”Hate” is an unfortunate word in the context, especially if we believe that hate can occasionally be an apt feeling/attitude.

There are additional reasons for preferring such terms: being at the receiving end of hatred is very nasty indeed, nevermind how irrational that hatred is. Being the victim of a prejudice, on the other hand, puts the responsibility squarly with the perpetrator.

Hate Crimes seem to be unproblematically wrong, then: they are unjustifiable. A much more subtle question is: Can they be excused? Committing a Hate Crime may never be the right thing to do (Even if I commit it to ”blow of steam”, thus stopping me from committing an even worse crime later on, this would not be a hate crime:the motivation is not hate, even if hate is part of the explanation of the crime), but can I be blameless for committing it? Can the hate I feel, or the prejudice/bias I manifest – be overwhelming, or can it have grown within me without my knowledge, and without my being able to stop it?

A further reason to step away from the word ”Hate” is that it suggests a temporary emotional state, and comes too close to  facilitating a ”temporary insanity” type excuse. When a hate crime is committed because of the criminal being provoked into a state of rage by the appearance of people of the despised group, it is not this state of rage that we wish to punish, but the disposition that made that rage a likely thing to have happened.

Even if I can not be held responsible for my emotional states (and that is a debatable point), and my emotional states may be so uncontrolled that I may not be responsible for my actions when I’m in one, I AM responsible for being the kind of person who would be provoked by certain things. If you can’t stand the heat, you should move slowly into the kitchen area in order to adjust – perhaps open a window? – and not trust yourself with any sharp utensils just yet.

Committing a crime out of hatred is not like ”temporary insanity”, but more like killing someone with your car when driving drunk.

There are more complicated ”excuse” type stories about hate crimes, however. Explanations that take a much broader perspective on criminals and criminal actions in general, and assign partial responsibility to society, to parents, to friends, co-workers, to chance. If the justification of punishment is retribution, and require pure, unadulterated responsibility, then perhaps some hate criminals should not be punished. Perhaps the only true hate crimes are cases where the hate is in some hard to determine sense YOUR OWN. If, on the other hand, we think that the function of law and punishment is deterrence, rehabilitation, public safety, and there are additional reasons to keep the law simple and displaying equal treatment, then we might have to ignore these stories and continue to view hate crimes as, in essence, inexcusable.

Don’t do the crime if you can’t pay the fine

So here is a simple, and certainly misleading, model of Crime and Punishment: When you are pondering whether you should commit a certain crime or not, you make a calculation: What is the probability that you will succeed? What will be gained if you do? What is the probability that you will be caught? What will happen to you if you are?

If the value of the probability of success times the value of what you gain is larger than the value of probability of getting caught times the value of the punishment, then it would seem to be rational to go for it. So far, so much cost-benefit analysis.

This reasoning, you might have noticed, is purely based on self-interest and that is, basically, what is wrong with it. You may get a moral argument to favor committing the crime if the values included in the the calculation includes not just the values for you but for everyone affected by the criminal act. Typically, then, if you rob someone poorer than you are, the value of your gain will presumably be lower than the value of their loss. So you shouldn’t do that, but Robin Hood -actions might be morally acceptable. In addition, if there is a gross benefit in you getting caught (people love to see a criminal caught, say. You may be the best thing ever on ”cops”), you may have a reason to commit the crime no matter the potential gain to you by success.

To back up this model, we can offer an idea of the law not as a list of prohibitions, but as a list of costs. Thus you can buy a murder at the prize of limited freedom for 20 years, say.

If cost-benefit analysis is the way to understand the criminal mind, there are clearly four things we can do to make crime less likely:

1)Improve security, so that probability of success gets lowered

2) Improve conditions for would-be criminals, so that the value of gaining something by theft, say, is lowered.

3) Increasing resources for the police, so that the probability of getting caught gets higher, or

4) Increase punishment levels, so that the cost of getting caught gets higher.

In fact, 2) can be achieved in a number of ways, the most cuddly of which is getting would-be criminals to care about societal values and the well-being of would-be victims. The negative impact on the victim would then become part of the ”cost” of the crime, even from a self-interest point of view. It’s also notable that under 4), there would seem to be an obvious way to stop crime entirely: to make every crime a capital offense.

It’s noteworthy that people differ when it comes to assigning values to all of these factors. If my life is not very nice, a prison sentence, or even a capital punishment, would not make it that much worse. Indeed, there are cases when criminals judge it to be the best available option. If I’m a very skilled criminal, probability of success is high and probability of getting caught is low. And if I’m not very well off, the value of the gain may be very high indeed. If people are cost-benefit machines, some people are rationally justified in committing crimes it would be irrational for others to commit.

A question arise: should the rationality of the crime have an impact on the punishment we deem to be appropriate? Should we punish crimes that are rational from the criminal’s point of view more, or should we punish the irrational criminal more? But if we do, this change in punishment level must be included in the calculation made by the criminal! The crime that would be rational if judged by an independent standard might become irrational if punished more harshly because it was rational! A pretty paradox, isn’t it?

(There would also be a cost-benefit analysis from the legislators view-point, of course, but this return to blogging has gone on quite long enough, I think)